


Strange Comforts

by UnnamedElement (Unnamed_Element)



Series: Fighting the Tide (Series) [2]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Family Issues, Legolas bakes, M/M, No explicit Silmarillion content until second half of story, Recovery, Sea-longing, Some characters are not tagged because that ruins the story, Specifically Elrondion family issues and Thranduilion family issues, in the next story, loss & grief & depression - because this would not be my fic if not, mental health, there's a happy ending eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29663835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unnamed_Element/pseuds/UnnamedElement
Summary: Legolas is rescued from the Sea after several months lost, and Ithildim has requested Gimli put him back together... Legolas, however, is not entirely forthcoming with his experiences; Elladan is not entirely skilled in working with wood-elves; Ithildim struggles to understand this version of Legolas who has become so frustrating to love; and Gimli finds that, for all his dwarven endurance, hedoesin fact have finite patience. Furthermore, it is revealed that Legolas met someone at the shore with a history as tangled as the threads of his own mind, and this will shake the foundation of each of their relationships.Sequel to "At Sea in the Middle of Ithilien. Part 2 of 3 in "Fighting the Tide." Fourth age fic.
Relationships: Elladan & Legolas Greenleaf, Gimli (Son of Glóin) & Legolas Greenleaf, Legolas Greenleaf/Ithildim Anarion, Legolas Greenleaf/Original Male Character(s)
Series: Fighting the Tide (Series) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096844
Kudos: 9





	1. Gimli

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to [[At Sea in the Middle of Ithilien](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28615434/chapters/70134843)], which will end up being a three part series. Reading "At Sea" first is highly recommended. Understanding how the Sea-longing functions in this "universe" is important to this story. "At Sea" is a fairly quick read.
> 
> For questions about my OCs, please ask, or find them in my other stories! While Ithildim is not Legolas' partner in all my stories, he is in this one, as he is in At Sea. Don't like? Don't read. I am tired of defending my characters and my own identity from those who dislike queerness in fic. Thank you. :)
> 
> Most of this fic is written and will be posted twice a month.
> 
> _No beta; all mistakes are mine._

**Somewhere in Gondor, inland**   
**Fourth Age 30**   
**Two weeks after Legolas is found**

I have been having a hard time with Legolas recently. We have been spending time together this past week or so—here, there, and everywhere—and his behavior has become unpredictable. Tonight, for example, he sits beside the fire in silence, alternating between whittling a stick and massaging his forearm with his fingertips. Usually, he at least whistles or hums while doing such quotidian things, but today he is quiet, when I would expect him to be buzzing. He has not even said a thing about the foul-smelling coffee Aragorn now insists I brew for him. I have been very loud in doing so, and he has not looked up.

Since we have found him, he has been doing things like apologizing too much, or not apologizing at all. He collects eggs for our breakfast at night, but then forgets I am there and eats them all before I wake; he sets out again as soon as I sit up and returns with two more, cooking and serving them without a word. Furthermore, he has been singing in his mother's tongue under his breath, which is not unusual in itself, but he does not seem to realize he is doing it, and he stares at me sometimes when I make jokes in Westron, as if he does not quite know what I mean.

He has taken to cuffing me on the head instead of answering my questions, but then rambling poetically about how appreciative he is of my friendship in the same minute.

And, though he was rather impressively bad-off when first we found him, he does not complain of pain, although I do see him digging at his hip periodically. I know he is taking the herbs Aragorn prescribed, because I check his medicine pouch daily, and they are gone, as I would hope and expect. I do not talk to him about it, because he is an adult and can take care of himself—now, at least—and I know I would scoff if he counted my doses after an illness.

So, yes, I have been having a hard time with Legolas recently, but _not_ because his actions currently are wildly different from what they were before. No, in fact, they are nearly the same. However, they do not _match_. The same situations do not elicit the same reactions: the usual jokes are met with silence instead of gaiety and expression; the evenings are not filled with song and stories, but instead one-person tasks and tunes underbreath; those moments in which we both used to know had no need for words are gone—he chatters through these now, as if nervous, or as if he cannot stop himself at all.

And he writes letters daily. He worries, and he writes, but he does not send them.

You see, when he returned, Ithildim did not take him back.

And while Legolas and I have been friends for decades and I have become very accustomed to the peculiarities of elves—and the strangeness of his folks in particular— a broken-hearted woodelf, with the Sea-longing, who has determinedly rooted himself in his folk and his friends and Middle-earth?

Well, nothing in our friendship entirely prepared me for this. I rather liked it better when his cheek burned, or when he would become misty-eyed over blossoms in Spring at the edge of his forest.

It is like he is relearning who he is. Every day he looks exhausted, and yet also, every day, he looks better. To me, it is exhausting, too.

I have finished preparing the coffee and strain it into a tall cup for him. I pour myself a splash as I have noticed it makes him less resentful if I at least sip, as well, and then I add a spoon of honey from a tin into his before pushing it toward him, and tapping the ground near his foot.

However, he has apparently finished whittling for the night for he is already paying me mind, staring at me—and now glancing at the steaming cup—twirling the pointed stick between his fingers. The small knife he uses for carving lays flat on the cloak upon which he sits, and he is whistling air through his teeth as he considers me, so that he sounds like a bad door in a windstorm. It is, frankly, obnoxious.

I raise my eyebrows at him, and he suddenly stops moving, but then jumps to his feet and shrugs. He tucks the sharpened stick behind his ear as if it were a pen.

"Would you eat fish tonight, Gimli, were I to catch it?"

He is standing there with his head cocked and his hair frizzy about his face, and the fire makes his eyes look darker and more tired than even they are.

I take a moment to shake off my previous thoughts and make myself feel present, and then I manage a laugh, and I tease him: "We are near but a small creek—where precisely do you expect to fish?"

He looks at me almost incredulously, and he does not answer.

I stare at him and he stares also at me. After a minute of silence, though, I blink, which breaks our gaze, and then he genuinely laughs. I jump so hard in surprise that I nearly upset my own cup.

"Oh, Gimli," he says, and he scratches at the back of his head and grasps both hands behind his neck before turning away. "I have gotten very good at fishing."

He begins to walk away so, quickly, I pick up my mug and call out his name. He turns back around, takes note of the coffee in my hands, and stoops to pick up his own before waving a hand over his shoulder as he turns away again.

"Thank you, Gimli," he calls, and then, quickly darkened by the shadows, he has disappeared.

Now, I do imagine he _has_ gotten very good at fishing. He was gone for a very long time, after all, and he still will not tell me what happened.

From very far away I hear the sound of him clearing his throat and spitting—he cannot _stand_ the coffee.

Anyway, I do not expect him back tonight. I am sure, instead, that we will have fish for breakfast.

So, for now, I go to sleep.


	2. Elladan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please pay attention to the relative "dates" given at the beginning of each chapter as you read! This story will move between perspectives and run on two different timelines.

**Minas Tirith**  
**Five days after Legolas is found**

I have been watching the two of them since they arrived in Minas Tirith yesterday evening. The three of us are gathered in Estel and Arwen's sitting room in these quiet hours before the evening meal. Legolas is sat across the room in the cushioned seat of the bay window, legs stretched before him and eyes closed as he listens; Gimli sits in an oversized, wingback chair to his right, reading aloud a Gondorian tale of romance and adventure that he found stored in a box, tucked away and labelled _Taurmíriel_ , on the bottommost bookshelf behind the couch. The book is silly and childish and not very good, but they both chuckle occasionally, nonetheless. I watch them now from the far side of the room as I play at reading, too, but—really—I am ruminating.

For all that we traveled together for long months during the war all those years ago, I spoke little to either of them then and they, in turn, spoke little to me. Then, they were only elf and dwarf at sea in a world of short-lived mortals—tied together at the hip, it seemed, like buoys in rough water, for ne'er did I see one without the other—and Elrohir and I were then only mannish-elves at the end of an Age, relics of a time long past, and we trailed behind Estel like lifeboats, should he ever have need of us. Looking back, I suppose it is not so strange that we did not speak, apart from the once, that time I had come upon Legolas looking adrift on the field after Pelennor, hunched over and laboring hopelessly to mend his tunic at the earliest of dawns, for it had been ripped beyond repair by a barely-avoided blade.

Of course, after all that, we had spoken at Arwen and Estel's wedding, for while royal he may not _carry_ himself, he knows well his place and how he is meant to navigate.

But just because we had not spoken outside of those fleeting moments, it does not mean that I had not watched him then, as I find myself doing—thirty-five years later—even now. Then, I watched Legolas and Gimli on our march as we approached Pelargir from Linhir, and I alone saw the moment Legolas was struck by the call of the Sea, for Elrohir was occupied elsewhere. Legolas had been knelt at his horse's feet when it happened, working a stone from the shoe with a hairpin, when he suddenly dropped the hoof so abruptly that the horse startled, and he turned his head toward the sky, and he stood slowly, as one entranced. Stiff as a board with one long hand against his brow and his head tilted to the side, he watched—three gulls were flown inland and they chased one another above our camp, as gulls will sometimes do when one alone carries a minnow and the others are set to steal it. I saw his mouth fall slightly open as he tilted himself back a little more, and his hand drifted from where it shielded his eyes to grasp at his horse's mane. He followed the gulls with his gaze until they disappeared into the heavy grey sky, and, then, he still did not move.

I watched from afar as he stood stricken, and I did not move either.

We were busy with war, I had told myself then, and I did not know Legolas so well as to approach him with a topic so intimate; I did not know his particular kind well enough, I reasoned, and I had little experience with Sea-longing myself, even learned as I was in lore and how often I pondered my fate. But there Legolas had stood, on the eve of war—yet leagues from the Sea—mindless and alone, until the dwarf Gimli approached and took him at the arm. He shook him soundly and pressed a cut of dried meat into his hand, thumping him congenially at the small of the back before turning away to whatever it was he had been doing before. Legolas vibrated from the thump as if he were a tree, stood steady and unaffronted. Then I had only watched as, finally, he turned vaguely to watch Gimli go with furrowed brow, before he sank to the ground, sank to his knees, and abandoned his meat to the grass below. He sat that way until Gimli returned and turned his cheek up toward him gently, and then I watched Legolas spring to his feet, lift the dwarf onto the horse, and bend down for his forgotten meal. He had leaned silently against the horse until Estel called for us to move—though he kept one hand wrapped about the ankle of Gimli's sturdy boot, as if he were their anchor—and later when they passed Elrohir and I to take food to Aragorn and implore that he eat, I could not meet his eye.

Years later, I found out from Estel that Legolas did not know what had happened to him that day, and that he walked into battle on the fields of the Pelennor with a fear he was losing his mind. How lucky he was to come out of that battle with only minor hurts, so lucky that the only thing he had lost was a well-fitted tunic…

It is one of only a few things I have regretted this Age—holding my silence—for Legolas is younger than even Arwen, and he grew in a land where the Sea-longing was a mythical affliction of ages past. Regardless of his strangeness to me, it was my duty as one of Elven blood for whom the Sea holds some sway to have offered what comfort I could. I have never been able to admit to Aragorn that I sent one of his dearest friends into battle with a sickened heart, when I might have done something to protect it.

And so, now—some thirty odd years later—we have come again to that moment all those years ago when I failed to offer counsel, and again I have had the chance to speak to him of a hurt, and I have not done so. For while, yes, I _have_ been observing elf and dwarf all this day from afar, and while I _did_ spend midmorning speaking at length of Legolas' health with Estel and Faramir, it was I, in fact, who first saw to him last night before Aragorn allowed him to sleep.

"I know you do not understand, Elladan," he had told me in the corridor outside Legolas and Gimli's suite, within which I could hear Legolas speaking softly while Gimli moved about, unpacking their things. "But you must trust me when I say that Legolas will be more inclined to let a stranger treat him now than I. I have never seen such guilt on him as I did when we greeted him in the front hall. He will not heap more worry upon us now, for he knows we have hurt all these months, and he will not let himself hurt me again—so soon upon his return—though he bears hurts himself." He paused. "He is of unfortunately staunch will."

And there was nothing logical I could think to say to that, for Estel knows Legolas better than I, and I had also seen the guilt and the shadow of fear swept across his face. It had radiated from his whole being when Faramir helped him down from where he sat side-saddle upon the horse in the courtyard, and when he actually looked away from thanking Faramir to acknowledge the rest of us, I felt his shame turn, too; it rocked against me like a wave.

Besides, I do not deny Estel much, as a rule.

We then entered the suite together after Aragorn courteously knocked, and the dwarf called to us to enter. We followed his voice through the sitting room to the room on the left. There, Legolas sat on the bed, his body pressed up against the windows, and he was folding the clothes Gimli had heaped about him, stacking them in neat piles. Gimli was shutting a trunk at the foot of the bed as we entered, and Legolas immediately dropped the socks he had been rolling together to pay us mind.

Aragorn crossed the room quickly and settled himself into the chair nearest Legolas, and I found myself behind him at his shoulder as he spoke.

"I read the report Faramir brought from Healer Tinu." Estel had spoken without preamble, and Legolas nodded and I could see that he forced himself to not look away. "We do not have to speak of it tonight, my friend, or of anything about where you have been… But you hold yourself stiff, and I would have you sleep before the morrow. Would you endure Elladan's touch to assure you are well?"

I had thought for a moment—the space of a few breaths only—that Legolas would deny us, for he had bitten his lip and pressed a hand to his forehead, but it seemed instead he had only been preparing himself to respond, for it quickly became obvious his face rushed warm with a blush that ran high on his cheeks and deep across his nose. He wiped the hand down his face and looked to Aragorn and then to me—

"Aye." And that was all he had said.

Gimli squeezed Legolas on the shoulder as he retreated into the common area, and then Estel walked me to a table in the corner on which were arranged herbs and bandages and various implements, assembled in preparation for his arrival several hours before. I hovered in the corner as Estel crossed the room to Legolas and put a hand to his cheek, bringing their foreheads together for only a moment. I had not emerged from the corner until Estel retreated and shut the door behind him, and then it was only Legolas and I, in the wide silence of his room.

I had approached the bed with care and sat gently on the edge of the recently-vacated chair, my hands clasped, watching. We conversed briefly as healer and patient, and I guided him in identifying his most pressing ill before rising slowly and helping him to gently slip from the marled waistcoat that piled and draped loosely at his hips. I then transferred the heaped and half-folded clothes near his window to the chair, and I realized, then—as I watched him pull his splinted arm delicately from his tunic and stepped forward to offer ease—that I had not paid much attention to him at all before this encounter… Mayhap that is why I found myself so startled as we worked him from his shirt and his trousers, for as he was unclothed it became doubly clear that he was dominated more by Silvan blood than he strikes from afar and was also, perhaps, affected by a later birth in a diminished Age. He was compact in stature and lean of limb, and had he not wasted so much on his sojourn I knew he would have held himself tight as a coiled spring as he laid himself flat. The mattress dipped low as I sat down beside him to probe at the injury he said troubled him most, and I found my hands looked overly large as I wrapped one about his hip to press along the ilium from front to back, to assure the minor fractures Tinu suspected had not been aggravated by those last few miles on horseback, the short distance from the docks at Harlond, through the Pelennor fields, and up the seven gated levels of the city.

He had not flinched as I pressed, and his physical pain was only betrayed by a sharp and ill-suppressed intake of breath when I ran my hand along the ridge of hipbone that rose most sharply above the valley of his belly. I glanced up toward his face before removing my hand, to assess that the pain was not greater than I had originally read in him, and that is when our eyes met. A surge of such unstoppable grief pierced through me in that moment that I had had to catch my breath myself—as if burned, I withdrew my hand from his battered body and stared.

He opened his mouth as if to speak—to justify—but then turned his eyes away, shifted his whole head as if he feared to be drawn back into the gaze and reveal his hurts too truly.

I had realized then that while the Sea still clung to him like a salted veneer, though now weaker and crumbling, that the grief I had felt when we were caught there in that shared vulnerability was of a kind complimentary to the Sea, yet almost wholly different. And I had also realized—immediately, and in that moment—that I was not, perhaps, the one who ought broach it with him; and not that evening, after his five long days of travel; and not when he looked so small in his normally strong body; and not when my hands—one alone large enough to wrap about his forearm when I stopped to rebind his arm—were heavy on this body that had worn itself to the thinnest I imagined it had ever been.

So I did not ask him from whence came the grief that cut me to my heart when I beheld it, and I instead asked him of his medicine, whether he preferred one for pain or for sleep, and, given the deep circles beneath his eyes when he turned to me again, I was not at all surprised by the answer.

And so I had left him there with a blessing and mug of tea, abandoned the room with some empty, murmured reassurance. The last I saw as I left the suites was Gimli, changed then into his own nightclothes and padding across the sitting area to Legolas' open door, a pillow and a blanket bundled against his chest.

I am interrupted in my recollection by the sitting room door pushing inward from the hall, and I find I have floated so far away from the room in my mind that my eyes have dried and I stare unfocused at the ledger in my lap.

It is Eldarion, come to invite us to tea.

I start to speak, but Gimli hushes me, and it is not until this moment that I take notice of the new and absolute quiet in the room, and I realize it is because the dwarf has stopped reading.

Legolas sleeps, eyes cracked and head turned toward the window in the late afternoon light. He is a picture of autumnal gold, even as sickly as I know him to be. Tawny skin contrasted with the loose, white shift so he is like bronze overlaid with porcelain; hair a dark amber shot through with gold, tied in a knot at his shoulder—it catches the sun and glitters subtly as his chest rises and falls in reverie, and his thin neck is dipping further toward his shoulder as he wanders further away from us in sleep.

I have to forcibly remind myself that this image of peace does not negate the pain I have felt from him today, that I felt from him yesterday, and that I felt—unbidden—long ago, in this far-away land, when he was first claimed by the Sea.

I turn to Eldarion and whisper that I will join him, and I pull a satchel of herbs from my pocket, cross the room with care, and I hand them to the dwarf.

"For his hip," I say, "when he wakes."

And then I watch Gimli nod as he takes the medicine—rough hands brushing against my own—and then I turn from them both and follow Eldarion. For just a moment, I hear Gimli sigh and readjust his book, and then the door sighs shut, too—heavy—and I leave them behind.


End file.
